Changes: That's just the way it is

It's a little sad to realize two of the things I identify with - tea and biking - might be making their way out of my life for good. It's not as traumatizing as a breakup, but still, it's tough to be moving on, and sometimes coming to terms with that takes more time than the changes themselves.


I realized I was hardcore addicted to tea one day at work: it was a busy day but my brain was sluggish and irritated. Something was amiss, but what? No signs of withdrawal appeared other than a few symptoms quite invisible to the outside world. Then I got to thinking about my habits.. and realized that I had become accustomed to filling my mug three, four, five times a day sometimes - nuking 10 or 12 ounce sof water at 2.5 minute blasts, and brewing loose or bagged tea, just to keep warm. On those days when the little old Virginia office sweltered because the AC was down, well, I drank tea then, too. And not just health-conscious green tea, either - usually some fruity variety of relatively high-octane black tea, because I have a huge collection of it in the drawer in my desk - too close to resist temptation.

Compared to coffee, tea is mild; but caffeine is caffeine, and my body doesn't know the difference between two cups of black tea and one cup of coffee. What my body did know was that I was inadvertently starving it on the day of my realization.

The idea of becoming dependent on something outside the self is uncomfortable to me to begin with - I prefer to power through pain from minor scrapes or headaches without the aid of a pill, and antibiotics make me nervous - but that wasn't it for me. It was the withdrawal symptoms that hammered the point home. Into my frontal lobe.

Why allow myself to get into some habit that I would have to keep up for the rest of my life if I didn't want to experience a fog of irritation everytime I forgot to feed the addiction? I've weaned myself off other material comforts in the name of environmental conservation, but the comfort of a fragrant cup never fell into the same mental category before. Until now.

So I'm on a strict regimen of herbal tea from here on out. I'm down to one cup of black/caffeinated tea per day (max). I know I'll miss the process of brewing tea, and that I'll feel a little gluttonous when I glance over my rather sizeable collection -- they're from around the world, you know -- but my sense of integrity will be redeemed.



What about biking, then?

Back in May, I had a great experience biking the Tour of the Scioto River Valley in Ohio, but I wasn't physically prepared for clocking 200 miles. My muscles fared fine, and mentally I was fit, but now the rest of my body is fighting back.

The problem is I don't know what's wrong. I just know that when I go on easy rides - completely flat, less than 15 miles, and slow - I experience sharp pain in my right knee. It seems the less obvious parts of my knee - the shadowy connective tissues and tendons - are obviously displeased about something.


It's not like I've been ignoring the pain; the last 30 miles of TOSRV was a special kind of hell, in which I had to learn to pedal half as fast using the force of the left side of my body only, riding into a nasty headwind in the home stretch. All the while feeling the weakness of my right knee with every stroke, not knowing at all why this was happenning to me.


To try to get a real diagnosis, I have an appointment with an orthopedist, but that's not reassuring; I keep thinking, what if I have to get off my bike permanently? This is the first sport where I've felt at home - and free - on my bike; running never worked because my feet got too hot, snowboarding was too damn scary (and painful; who wants to be black and blue everytime they go to have some fun?), and few people actually want to play tennis with me without making it a match - competition I can't mentally handle.


Worse yet, what if I can't serve in Malawi with the Peace Corps, where biking might just be the main everday mode of transportation? Where will I be then? Sure, I could wait for another assignment to come along in a few months, but I can't - and don't want - to keep working as an intern at CHEJ forever.


This is a change I obviously haven't yet come to terms with. But the conclusion hasn't yet been drawn, so I'll have to wait and see.

Super-fly Blueberry Pie (vegan)

I made this pie this weekend after trekking to Larriland farms for some serious pick-your-own fruit action.. and it's gone already! I guess that's par for the course when you live with 9 other people. It's an amalgamation of recipes, so here it is the way I actually did it.

Ingredients
pie
1 Graham cracker crust (or make your own - crumble some graham crackers, mix with butter, and press into a pie pan)
6 cups blueberries (3 pints) 1/2 cup sugar 5 Tbs. quick-cooking tapioca Finely grated peel of 1 orange (optional)2 Tbs. fresh orange juice 1 Tbs. fresh lemon juice
crumble topping
3/4 C finely chopped almonds, walnuts, or pecans (hint: food processor!)
1/4 C vegan spread, cold or room temp, cut into 1/2" cubes
1/2 t salt
2/3 C unbleached flour
1/4 C brown sugar

Directions
- Filling: In a saucepan on medium, dissolve the sugar in the lemon and orange juice.
- Add tapioca and blueberries, mixing gently but thoroughly. Turn heat up to high.
- Cook for about 15 minutes, or until tapioca pellets mostly "disappear" and blueberries develop a nice syrup and a thicker consistency.
- Cool filling directly in saucepan for an hour (in the fridge).
- Crumble topping: pulse all ingredients together in food processor until well-mixed. Set aside in a shallow bowl.
- Crumble the topping by breaking it up with your fingers.
- Preheat oven to 400 degF.
- Spoon the chilled filling into your graham cracker crust until nice and high, but not overflowing.
- Sprinkle the crumble topping over the pie, using up as much as you can. Using a fork makes it easier to avoid big clumps.
- Stick the pie in the oven (on a baking pan to distribute heat better) in the center for about 15-20 mins, until the top begins to brown. Check every 5 mins, then more frequently when it begins to get fragrant.

The Role of Documentaries: This is Not About Michael Moore

I've been privileged to watch some excellent documentaries lately: Kassim the Dream at American Film Institute's Silver Theatre in Silver Spring; Taxi to the Dark Side and Bishar Blues at Busboys and Poets near U Street. The stories presented in these three were all moving enough to enlarge my personal view of the world. A brief description of each:

• Kassim the Dream is the story of a Ugandan immigrant to America who struggles with his boxing career at the same time that he tries to come to terms with his past as a child soldier in the army and the friends, family, and displaced persons left behind.
• Taxi to the Dark Side delves into the horrific practices by the US Army (and the policies that enabled them) in American prisons abroad and at Guantanamo, centering around the story of a taxi driver whose fate is to suffer and die from fatal blows to the legs - all in the name of collecting foreign intelligence.
• Bishar Blues tells the story of the fakirs in Bengal, India, who struggle to transcend religious classification and caste limits in a society that ostracizes them for their earnest practice. Their beliefs celebrate the holiness within people and are a modern manifestation of the human lifestyle of Mohammed (and Jesus, for that matter) before institutional structure began to dominated these ideologies.
  

Though vastly different in subject matter, the obvious common thread is a portrayal of people who have been marginalized, intended to be digested and enjoyed by a broader audience. Is shining the public, artistic light on the small stories then the purpose of most or all documentaries? To explore this idea a bit, I turn to a Chilean documentalist I briefly researched for a Spanish class report on art during Pinochet's reign of terror.

Patricio Guzman is a famed documentalist born in Chile in the 1940s who was left his country when Augusto Pinochet, supported by the United States, took power from Salvador Allende in a coup that ushered in an era of murder and missing persons, quieted journalists, and stolen livelihoods. His first film, La Batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile) documented the coup and was nominated by CINEASTE, an American magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, as one of the top 10 political films in the world.

Guzman has a lot to say about the importance of the making of documentaries. In Spanish and then in English, two quotes from his website:

"No todos los documentalistas somos cazadores de eventos, sino que también somos poetas, que tratamos de encontrar en el tiempo y espacio reales las huellas de la gente, aún las más ínfimas," y "Un país sin cine documental es como una familia sin album de fotografias."

"Not all makers of documentaries are hunters of current events, rather we are also poets that try to find in contemporary time and space the paths of the people, even the smallest," and "A country without documentary film is like a family without a photo album."

For Chile, his films serve to remember the awful events of the reign of terror that forever changed their lives and their relationship to their home. They are a remembrance that begins to do justice to the desaparecidos, who went missing from their families never to be heard from again (and who probably faced fates as dark as torture and mass, unmarked graves). Here, the documentaries are more than an educational film about people without the glamour to make it into a media dominated by celebrities and economics. You and I are united through these films with a marginalized people through knowledge of their struggle. To return to Kassim, the dramatization of dark events brings emotional release, and enables us to live more humanely like the fakirs of Bengal in Bishar Blues.

Update (19/7/08): A new website is making documentaries available for free viewing online. Kudos to them for using the internets for its most edifying purpose: worldwide distribution!